The collapse of the Obama strategy against radical Islamists

The real meaning of the violence of the last week across the Muslim world is the bankruptcy and collapse of the Obama strategy which began with his speech in Cairo. President Obama had a deep conviction that pandering to Islamic sympathies, identifying with the virtues of Islam and parroting phrases that sounded good would lead to a deeper acceptance of the United States by Muslims.

While reaching out to “mainstream Muslims,” the Obama strategy would wage selective war against designated enemies. The Obama administration decided to ignore concerns of sovereignty and to kill terrorists with stepped up drone attacks.

The killing of the American ambassador to Libya was apparently a direct retaliation for the American killing in Pakistan of a Libyan senior al Qaeda commander. The Obama administration has desperately sought to spin all the violence as caused by one hostile anti-Muslim movie.

Once again Obama and the elite media blame America for the hostility of others. In their ideology it is much safer for America to be the bad guys. Then we can excuse the violence, the attack on embassies, the burning of the American flag, the destruction of American businesses and American schools. In the Obama-elite media worldview that is all somehow the result of American provocation.

“If only some American hadn’t made a bad movie, everything would be ok,” is the view the Obama administration and the elite media has exuded.

There are three things profoundly wrong with this analysis.

1. The Libyans reject it as a matter of fact.

2. It confuses excuse with cause.

3. It suggests a solution which would subordinate American civilization to Islamic supremacists.

First, al Qaeda has asserted the attack on the American ambassador to Libya was a revenge killing. Senior Libyan officials have rejected the idea that the Benghazi violence was caused by the anti-Muslim film. They see no relationship between the Egyptian riots against the film and the team of killers who tracked down Ambassador Chris Stevens.

The Obama administration is desperate to avoid linkage between predator strikes in Pakistan and the deliberate revenge killing in Benghazi. That would undermine all their assertions about the collapse of al Qaeda. It would bring into doubt their claims for an Arab Spring democracy movement. If this is an act of war, as I asserted last week in Politico, then all the Obama and media assertions about “senseless violence” begin to look as shallow, silly and self-deceiving as they are.

Second, the last week of violence stretching from London to Australia is a signal about the depth of anti-American and anti-Western passion among radical Islamists.

The silly anti-Muslim film was an excuse for violence not the cause of it. It joins the Danish cartoon incident as another example of the deliberate use of Western freedom as an excuse for violence.

The Iranian announcement that they had increased the bounty for killing Salman Rushdie for his novels was one more piece of this violence against any challenge to Islamic supremacy.

We have to be clear that the real problem is not the movie but the hatred, the bigotry, the mass hysteria of religious fanatics who see their values threatened by modernity and are in a desperate fight to impose their values on the world.

Third, the very dangerous game the Obama administration and the elite media are playing in suggesting that we censor American words and American art in order to appease Muslim religious fanatics has to be directly challenged.

As a Christian, these same left wing media elites have lectured me for years about the authenticity of “art” involving Christ immersed in urine or Mary smeared with elephant dung. We have been told again and again that we have to put blasphemous speech and obscenely offensive items in taxpayer funded museums.

Now these same left wingers are explaining that it is OK to censor in order to appease Muslims. The White House is begging Google to remove the video from YouTube.